There are certain quirky discoveries that delight you to the core, the mere thought of which continue to bring a giddy smile to your face because of how endearing they feel.
This morning, listening to a podcast on the short drive home from a dawn patrol session at my local break, I sank my teeth into a delicious new morsel of information:
Sal Khan, the founder of the free educational platform that bears his name (Khan Academy), spent his high school years as the lead singer in a death metal band called "Malignancy."
That's awesome. It's the kind of fact that makes the world a better place just by being true. But that's not all.
He grew up with a single mother as the only East Asian kid in his region of Louisiana, where the convenience store his mother worked at for $16,000 a year faced the largest "David Duke for President" advertisement in the area. One group of friends did Knowledge Bowls, the other did drugs. Despite these inauspicious origins, he went on to study at MIT and Harvard Business School.
His story grows even more unlikely. While his friends made oodles of money doing the things that MBAs do, he founded an eponymous nonprofit and left his management consulting job to dedicate himself to making education available to anyone, anywhere.
Sal is a misfit in the best sense of the term. He's someone who loves learning but also heavy metal; he appreciates a good New Orleans style of revelry but also an economic epiphany that helps him understand the world.
Best of all, he feels comfortable enough is his own skin to act on his passions and convictions, and in so doing he helps to repair a broken world.
I was in a funk at the start of this week.
Knowing that Sal is 1) acting in good faith to 2) assist people he does not know with 3) no desire for personal benefit restores my faith in humanity.
Comments 7
I’m a big fan of Sal Khan.
Even more so now after learning all these facts that I didn’t know about him.
I don’t have his genius or reach but I can relate a bit to his background.
Who would have bet on him in his youth? Few would have bet on me if they saw me as an impoverished, rock-blasting, game-playing, high school drop out.
I learned to confidently take my own path in life. Taking two voluntary huge pay cuts and working for a non-profit worked out great.
It is a reminder to have the confidence to be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
Author
Wealthy Doc,
I respectfully beg to differ – you are the bootstrapper that comes to mind most quickly when I try to think of folks overcoming odds. Another acquaintance, Dr. Alfredo QuiƱones, went from migrant farm worker who came from Mexico to a Neurosurgeon at Hopkins.
That confidence you exhibited makes all the difference.
Thanks for stopping by,
CD
Kahn is Zen. The “sound of one hand clapping” is the potential to connect with another and “get the clap”. The sound is a potential sound. The potential energy of an avalanche is perfectly quantifiable and the aftermath strikes awe. Neither event, if the event happens, is random. 2 hands meeting in space is a complex calculation of 2 independent trajectories. In general it happens because the 2 hands are connected to 1 brain. An avalanche is a complex calculation of dynamic changes in the coefficient of friction and hydrogen bonding effectively acting on a mass suspended in space.
Like any good electrical engineer, Kahn ignored the constraints of earmarked “money” and the structure that rose around the acquisition of that earmarked money, what we call “education”. Math is math. Physics is physics. 5,000 distributed teachers are not required. 5000 campuses are not required. A full load of administration at each is not required. Dormitories are not required. 100K/yr tuition is not required. All you need is 10 teachers and a distributed network. Andreasen says software is eating the world, and so it is.
Author
There is a beauty to someone with an outsider mentality and a comfort with his own eccentricity eschewing the expected in order to create the improbable.
There is beauty. Even more than beauty there is an exponential deflationary pressure on the finance surrounding the creation of the improbable. If you’re betting on inflation, you’re screwed.
Wow. That is pretty awesome Crispy Doc. Love that. Will have to tell Mr. Plastic Picker. He’ll love that too. Love how people are like onions, many layers.
Author
Appreciate your stopping by, DPP. It’s these sorts of details that bring out the delightful facets and make icons into relatable, only too human examples of our species.